This disclosure relates generally to providing digital content to a client device, and in particular to providing digital content to the client device for consumption while the client device has limited or no network connectivity.
Client devices, such as mobile devices, retrieve digital content from various sources through a network for presentation to a user. Mobile devices are popular client devices for accessing digital content because of their ease of use and portability. This portability exposes the mobile devices to different locations having different connectivity to network resources. When a mobile device is in a location with impaired network connectivity, the mobile device cannot access digital content for presentation to the user.
To provide offline access to digital content, a conventional mobile device may retrieve and store digital content while connected to a network, allowing a user to access the stored digital content when the mobile device is disconnected from the network. Because the mobile device retrieves the digital content while connected to the network, the stored digital content is necessarily older, and therefore less relevant, when the mobile device is subsequently disconnected form the network than digital content available if the mobile device had a connection to the network. To provide more recent digital content for offline consumption, a mobile device may frequently retrieve digital content when the mobile device has at least a threshold level of connectivity with a network. However, frequent retrieval of digital content increases power consumption by the mobile device, which more rapidly drains the mobile device's battery. Additionally, frequently retrieving digital content may increase consumption of data allocated to a user by a network carrier or other service provider, which may cause the user to incur additional charges by the network carrier or service provider.